Using artificial intelligence to track birds' dark-of-night migrations

IMAGE: Map colors indicate estimates of migration traffic from measurements at 143 radar stations. Locations are indicated by white circles, with size proportional to migration traffic at the station. On many evenings during spring and fall migration, tens of millions of birds take flight at sunset and pass over our heads, unseen in the night sky. Though these flights have been recorded for decades by the National Weather Services' network of constantly scanning weather radars, until recently these data have been mostly out of reach for bird researchers. That's because the sheer magnitude of information and lack of tools to analyze it made only limited studies possible, says artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Dan Sheldon at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.